> Made in the past ~5 years. I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3

> Made in the past ~5 years. I'm dubious unless they've made serious improvements to the emulator since I last used it. (I haven't updated my SDK in probably 3-6 months.) I ran it on a fairly beefy laptop (although ~1.5-2 years at the time) and it was not an environment I'd consider "fun" to program in. They have ways to image the emulator for faster load-times, but that's not that much of an improvement, and it only affects the emulator boot-up time, not the application speed. I should try it again on my new desktop, complete with SSD and gobs of RAM. But honestly I would not develop for Android [relying solely on the emulator] on a machine much older than a year or two. I guess your mileage varied, but my experience developing for Android [w/o physical hardware] on fairly recent hardware was not pleasant. Had it been a hobby, and not my career, I would've been entirely put off with the experience. I probably wouldn't have gotten a phone, and I would've moved on to developing for another platform. Possibly WebOS, I remember it caught my eye back when the Pre launched; and I think it had the whole $0-up-front aspect in its favor.